The 1973 horror/suspense film “Torso” curiously echoes on a number of points the murder in Perugia in addition to the Monster of Florence case. The film was originally called “The Bodies Present Traces of Carnal Violence” which was then shortened to just “Torso” and then “Carnal Violence”.

Having watched the film I have compiled ten points of correspondence between the film and the Meredith Kercher/Monster of Florence cases as follows:

1. In the film the murder takes place in Perugia, Italy.
2. Primarily female students at the University of Perugia are the target of the assailant.
3. American exchange students are embroiled in the unfortunate series of events.
4. The killer also attends the university but turns out to be the students’ professor.
5. Echoing the modus operandi of the Monster of Florence, the killer spies on and then murders and mutilates young lovers in the countryside around Perugia (in the case of the Monster of Florence case it is of course the countryside around Florence). [The chief prosecutor in the Knox/Sollecito case, Giuliano Mignini, was also involved in the Monster of Florence case and had himself drawn a connection between the Monster of Florence and the Knox/Sollecito cases. The Monster of Florence didn’t become a media phenomena until 1981 when two lovers were killed and this was then linked to a previous similar case in 1974 and then sometime later to a further case in 1968].
6. The first female student killed in the film has the first name of “Florence”.
7. A threatening phone call is made by the killer in the film and in the Monster of Florence case warning a witness not to speak up about what they may have witnessed.
8. A group of female students retire to and share a lonely villa overlooking Perugia and the killer follows them there.
9. When the killer strikes at the villa one of the female students escapes the carnage because she is asleep in her room having badly injured her foot. (Amanda Knox was out when the killer had struck).
10. Knowing that the killer is again returning to the villa (having locked her in) she quickly tidies her room to conceal all evidence of her presence there. However she realises she has left a vital clue for the killer in the form of her shoes which she has clumsily left on the stairs after surveying the crime scene. The killer discovers the shoes and detects her presence in the house. (Knox and Sollecito were accused of fabricating evidence by rearranging the crime scene to make it look like a break in had occurred).

The question has to be asked what is the statistical probability that these ten points of correspondence between the film “Torso” and the Meredith Kercher/Monster of Florence cases are based purely on the result of chance alone? I myself have not been able to calculate the statistical probability involved but am sure that the odds against pure chance alone are extremely high.

It was exactly the question I was going to ask. You have noticed some similarities between a fictional murder and a couple of real life ones. It is not clear which sources several of your points relate to. Some of them would be common to many fictional or real murders or other crimes (e.g. threatening witnesses, young lovers, hiding evidence, female victims ...). Some are stretched to make your point (away = asleep).

So a few similarities. How many differences? How many similarities would you find between three randomly chosen murder cases (real and/or fictional)? What about three not-so-randomly chosen ones? How many would be statistically significant?

I'm not sure what the point is. Apart from, "here's an interesting coincidence".

Without wishing to overstate my case, everything in the observable universe definitely has its origins in Northamptonshire -- Alan Moore

It was exactly the question I was going to ask. You have noticed some similarities between a fictional murder and a couple of real life ones. It is not clear which sources several of your points relate to. Some of them would be common to many fictional or real murders or other crimes (e.g. threatening witnesses, young lovers, hiding evidence, female victims ...). Some are stretched to make your point (away = asleep).

So a few similarities. How many differences? How many similarities would you find between three randomly chosen murder cases (real and/or fictional)? What about three not-so-randomly chosen ones? How many would be statistically significant?

I'm not sure what the point is. Apart from, "here's an interesting coincidence".

I am saying that the coincidences are statistically significant even though I have not actually calculated them and you are saying they are not.

For a professional statistician to properly calculate the stats a large amount of supporting research is inevitably involved. You need to have the facts and figures before you before you can even think of the doing the maths.

There are a number of cases on record where a video nasty has inspired real life murder and something along these lines was even suggested in the Amanda Knox trial.

For example how many video nasties are there out there where the town is specifically named where the serial killing takes place?

I have come up with a technical question regarding the Monster of Florence case that I have been unable to answer.

It is said the MoF used a torch to temporarily blind the occupants of the car before shooting the male occupant first. But how could the investigators have known this about the torch if there were no surviving eyewitnesses?

Perhaps the investigators assumed the assailant would have needed a torch to have fired accurately in the dark but if you go yourself to a unlit country lane on a moonless night it is surprising how much you can actually see. I did this myself recently having travelled to a hill overlooking my home town to admire the distant lights. After your eyes have adjusted you can see pretty much everything. You can easily get by without a torch. However the investigators actually emphasize that the torch had been used so as to startle the occupants of the car.

Another thing I find curious about the MoF case is how the perpetrator managed to locate his victims. Finding lovers in lovers lanes can't have been that easy a task and he must have been fairly mobile.

It is said the MoF used a torch to temporarily blind the occupants of the car before shooting the male occupant first. But how could the investigators have known this about the torch if there were no surviving eyewitnesses?

But maybe there were "eye"witnesses...
.

Willy Kühne, professor of physiology at Heidelberg, took up the study of rhodopsin, and in one extraordinary year learned almost everything about it that was known until recently. In his first paper on retinal chemistry Kühne said: “Bound together with the pigment epithelium, the retina behaves not merely like a photographic plate, but like an entire photographic workshop, in which the workman continually renews the plate by laying on new light-sensitive material, while simultaneously erasing the old image.”

Kühne saw at once that, with this pigment which bleaches in the light, it might be possible to take a picture with the living eye. He set about devising methods for carrying out such a process, and succeeded after many discouraging failures. He called the process optography and its products optograms.

One of Kühne’s early optograms was made as follows. An albino rabbit was fastened with its head facing a barred window. From this position the rabbit could see only a gray and clouded sky. The animal’s head was covered for several minutes with a cloth to adapt its eyes to the dark, that is to let rhodopsin accumulate in its rods. Then the animal was exposed for three minutes to the light. It was immediately decapitated, the eye removed and cut open along the equator, and the rear half of the eyeball containing the retina laid in a solution of alum for fixation. The next day Kühne saw, printed upon the retina in bleached and unaltered rhodopsin, a picture of the window with the clear pattern of its bars.

Two years later he repeated the process with the head of an executed criminal. The resulting optigram, which he reproduced in a drawing, is the only known picture taken with a human eye. Unfortunately, the scene it displayed was unidentifiable.

Grief is the price we pay for love. (CM Parkes) Our postillion has been struck by lightning. (Unknown) War is always the choice of the chosen who will not have to fight. (Bono) The years tell much what the days never knew. (RW Emerson) Reality is not always probable, or likely. (JL Borges)

The animal’s head was covered for several minutes with a cloth to adapt its eyes to the dark, that is to let rhodopsin accumulate in its rods. Then the animal was exposed for three minutes to the light. It was immediately decapitated, the eye removed and cut open along the equator, and the rear half of the eyeball containing the retina laid in a solution of alum for fixation. The next day Kühne saw, printed upon the retina in bleached and unaltered rhodopsin, a picture of the window with the clear pattern of its bars.

For how long does rhodopsin stay in place after death and was this method even employed in the case?

Grief is the price we pay for love. (CM Parkes) Our postillion has been struck by lightning. (Unknown) War is always the choice of the chosen who will not have to fight. (Bono) The years tell much what the days never knew. (RW Emerson) Reality is not always probable, or likely. (JL Borges)

Another thing I find curious about the MoF case is how the perpetrator managed to locate his victims. Finding lovers in lovers lanes can't have been that easy a task and he must have been fairly mobile.

I've just started reading Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi's "The Monster of Florence" and according to them there was quite a high density of lover's meeting in cars around the city of Florence at the time.

Again, according to the authors, the problem was so bad that there was also a problem with voyeurs stalking them with a variety of equipment including parabolic dishes for sound recordings and see-in-the-dark cameras. There was also apparently a problem with blackmailers stalking these voyeurs hoping to photograph them in the act. A community existed among these voyeurs who would meet socially before an evening of voyeurism and, in return for money, exchange details of 'good cars' and where to find them.

But if it was as bad as that then there would have been a very real risk of the assailant being caught or even photographed in the act?

The first individual arrested for the crimes had been accused of being such a voyeur.

Martino's not even happy confining the death to the beautiful Perugia setting, removing Dani, Jane, and two other gorgeous pieces of chaff (Carla Brait and Angela Covello, as lesbian lovers Ursula and Katia) to an isolated Abruzzo retreat, where they're further preyed upon. With all these stabbings and tits soaked into the Italian psyche, no wonder Amanda Knox couldn't get a fair shake.

It seems the whole case against Amanda Knox and her boyfriend was based upon the blogs of an internet based conspiracy theorist and psychic, Gabriella Carlizzi:

In their book, The Monster of Florence, Douglas Preston, an American writer, and Mario Spezi, an Italian journalist, tell how Mignini was drawn to the theories of a crackpot named Gabriella Carlizzi, who ran a conspiracy theory website. Carlizzi believed that a satanic cult known as the School of the Red Rose was behind the Monster of Florence killings and 9/11. After Meredith’s murder, Carlizzi announced on her blog that “[t]he human sacrifice of the student [Meredith Kercher] bears a close connection with the ... Monster of Florence....” She’d later claim that the crime possessed “the characteristics of a ritual culminating in human sacrifice.” It seems the public minister of Perugia was listening.

The same psychic also influenced the Monster of Florence investigation:

It was in 2002 that Michele Giuttari, the latest detective to head an investigation into the Monster's killings, exhumed the body of Francesco Narducci, a doctor from Perugia who had drowned in Lake Trasimeno in 1985. Apparently acting on a lead provided by Gabriella Carlizzi, a psychic who claims to be fed information by a long-dead priest, the public prosecutor of Perugia, Giuliano Mignini, persuaded Mr Giuttari that Mr Narducci had not committed suicide but had been murdered by important Florentines because they, like Mr Narducci, were involved in Masonic rites which centred on the Monster's murders.